Prof. Peter Osborne defends PhD dissertation

Faculty member Peter Osborne successfully defended his PhD dissertation, Forest-Building: A New Approach for the Integrated Design of Forests and Buildings, on March 28 at McGill University. 

Osborne is Assistant Professor of Climate Adaptation and Building Rehabilitation at the Azrieli School of Architecture & Urbanism.

New forest management approaches are needed to increase the resilience and adaptability of forests to climate change and other natural disturbances, he observes. This means the wood-building industry needs to adapt.

“Accordingly, this dissertation expands the evaluation of the ecological resilience of forest ecosystems based on functional diversification to include a trait-based approach to building with wood,” he says.

Some content of the dissertation has been published in the PNAS journal here.

Summary

Forest-Building: A New Approach for the Integrated Design of Forests and Buildings

Along with forest managers, architects and builders are key change agents of forest ecosystems’ structure and composition through the specification and use of wood products. New forest management approaches are being advocated to increase the resilience and adaptability of forests to climate change and other natural disturbances.

Such approaches call for a diversification of our forests based on species’ functional traits that will dramatically change the harvested species composition, volume, and output of our forested landscapes.

This calls for the wood-building industry to adapt its ways of operating. Accordingly, this dissertation expands the evaluation of the ecological resilience of forest ecosystems based on functional diversification to include a trait-based approach to building with wood.

This trait-based plant-building framework is used to illustrate how forecasted forest changes in the coming decades may impact and guide decisions about wood-building practices, policies, and specifications.